The digital obsession that’s driving us iCrazy

Proof is piling up that our cyberspace addiction causes depression, anxiety and psychosis. Is the human race being rewired for good?

In South Korea the government is organising an internet curfew for children (Getty)

B
efore he launched the most viral video in internet history, Jason Russell was
a half-hearted web presence. His YouTube account was dead, and his Facebook
and Twitter pages were a trickle of pictures of his children and gardening
updates. The web wasn’t made “to keep track of how much people like us”, he
thought, and when his own tech habits made him feel like “a genius, an
addict, or a megalomaniac”, he unplugged for a few days.

But last March, Russell struggled to turn off anything. He had posted a link
to Kony 2012, his deeply personal web documentary about Joseph Kony, the
Ugandan warlord. The idea was to use social media to make Kony famous as the
first step to stopping his crimes. And it seemed to work: the film hurtled
through cyberspace, clocking more than 70m views in less than a week. But
something happened to Russell in